Worldweavers: Cybermage (22 page)

Michelle Cope of Bryant Park Market Events/ID&A, LLC, and Joseph Kinney, Senior Project Engineer at the New Yorker Hotel Management Company, were both kind enough to respond to my requests for information by sending articles, photographs, and valuable insights into details that made my story stronger and better, and I am indebted to both of them.

Many friends helped me out by gathering information, sending photographs of places I was too far away from to explore myself, and giving me invaluable feedback about both story and its building blocks—too many to list, because I would be sure to omit some deserving name. To all of you out there, and you well know who you are, my grateful thanks.

To my usual staunch support crew—Jill, Ruth, a team of amazing copy editors at HarperCollins—you made this book what it is, as always. To my parents, who worried, and waited with increasingly impatient anticipation, and took up the slack of everything else that needed doing so that I’d have time to write, my boundless thanks. And then there’s my husband, Deck, first reader and ruthless editor, who once again helped me mold my vision into a story.

And to you, the readers. Thank you for visiting Thea’s world, and for being her friend.

SO WHO WAS NIKOLA TESLA, REALLY?

The reader of the Worldweavers books would search in vain for Thea Winthrop, the FBM, or the Alphiri in
our
world—they are products of their own universe, and their existence doesn’t spill over into ours.

But Nikola Tesla is real.

He was a Serbian-born inventor, physicist, and mechanical engineer, and has been almost universally acclaimed as the greatest electrical engineer in history. Born during a thunderstorm, sometime around midnight of July 10, 1856, he lived with lightning all the days of his life.

After an extended “apprenticeship” in Europe, where he worked for various telecommunications and electrical companies in Budapest and Paris,
Tesla arrived in the United States of America—armed with only a letter of recommendation for Thomas Edison and four cents in his pocket.

Even in our own magic-challenged world, he quickly earned the nickname New Wizard of the West. But Tesla, the greatest mind of his century, was not a practical man. He was in frequent financial trouble. He possessed an old-world sense of honor and the way “things were done,” and would sign away the rights to the royalties for patents that would have supported him comfortably in his old age because of a sense of grace and obligation. The man who held hundreds of patents in his lifetime for motors, bladeless turbines, wireless transmission of energy, the logic gate technology that paved the way for modern computers—the man who practically invented the twentieth century as we knew it—would be almost unknown, his achievements glossed over or attributed to others.

It might have been Thomas Edison who invented the lightbulb, but it is Tesla’s alternating current version of electricity, not Edison’s direct current, that powers them today. If asked who invented the radio, most people would offer the name of Guglielmo Marconi—although a Supreme Court decision finally
awarded that right to Nikola Tesla. Although there is a statue of Tesla at Niagara Falls, many people have no idea that it was Tesla, and Tesla’s ideas and technology, that tamed that powerful resource into producing vast amounts of electrical energy.

Nikola Tesla did, dared, and achieved so much, and yet he died in poverty, alone, a tired and largely forgotten old man whose only friends were the pigeons of New York City.

Perhaps he really did have magic, in a world that could not understand or value it.

There are many books written about Tesla, and they paint a picture of a complex, fascinating, gifted human being. Some of these are listed below, if anyone should wish, after having met the fictional Tesla from
Cybermage
, to get to know the real man.

Lomas, Robert.
The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century: Nikola Tesla, the Forgotten Genius of Electricity.
London: Headline Book Publishing Ltd, 2000. An accessible and simply written biography that might be a good place to start reading about Tesla.

Cheney, Margaret.
Tesla: Man Out of Time
. New York: Touchstone, 2001. One of the best and most
accessible biographies of Nikola Tesla.

Seifer, Marc J.
Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla—Biography of a Genius
. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 2001. Neither the first nor the last time he has been called a wizard.

Cheney, Margaret, and Robert Uth.
Tesla: Master of Lightning
. New York: Metrobooks, 2001. A coffee table book with lots of magnificent illustrations and photographs; may currently be difficult to obtain, but other similar books are no doubt out there and this one might still be available for those willing to invest a little time in the search for it.

Jacket art © 2009 by Cliff Nielsen